JSngry

I totally agree that he was a helluva an enntertainer, up to the end in fact (saw him on Letterman in the very late 80s singing "I Can't Get Started", and it ws superb). But that's not the purpose of this poll!

Joe Farrell album cover poll soon to come!

But a deep nothing never the nonetheless.

Don't know what they're reissuing, but I've got two old Chess/Checker/whatever sides that Jewel/Paula reissued, and they are HILARIOUS. Some of the funniest comedy records I own. Pigmeat's delivery SWUNG!

That was an amazing band, and their records are amongst the best of Cecil's entire career, I think. Lyons was in prime form, Malik is strong and surefooted, and the Sirone/Jackson tandem was actually "funky" in a uniquely Taylor-eque way. Ameen fit in ok, too. Ina lot of ways, that mid-70s run by Cecil's group was the apex of his music. Not that there hasn't been much of worth since then, but it was a genuine WORKING band, something that he had never really had before, not of this scale anyway. The music, beginning with the Music & Arts albums, hit strong, and each subsequent release just got stronger. It was truly a Golden Age. Then Jimmy passed... Can I have my porridge back now, please?

Yeah, right. Just like Keith Richards can get high on aspirin and a Coke.

Jamal's albums on Impulse! were some pretty interesting stuff too, especially that one where he did "I Say A Little Prayer" and made it into a whole 'nother thing.

Japanese imports, both. $20 or so bucks a pop, About 60 minutes worth of music combined. That's rougly 67 cents a minute. A long-distance call to Japan may very well cost less, I dunno... But damn fine music it is, especcially the under-30-minutes COLLATES. DAMN fine music. If American Verve ever issues this stuff responsibly, I'm there. But until they do, BURN, BABY, BURN!

Ronnie Zito, the drummer on this album, is brother of Torrie Zito, the arranger (who also contributed many of the tunes here), and has played w/Woody Herman & Bobby Darin, a.o. A Google search truned up a surprising number of hits. I found out that, as of 1999, Reese was a practicing psychologist who still played jazz. http://cornell-magazine.cornell.edu/Archiv...Notes50-59.html http://www.allny.com/health/psychiatry.html The book that Marty mentioned: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0...3760112-8591369 http://www.music.indiana.edu/borrowing/browsemn.html And Jesse Avery, the tenorist/flautist here, was appaerntly a frined/bandmate of Scott LaFaro back in the mid-1950s http://www.geocities.com/chuck_ralston/10slfchr-5055.htm Interesting buncha folks, these were, it seems.

I took "Sanctuary", because it's a mindphuck of a way to end an mindphuck of an album.

Poor guy...

Da' Bastids got it (had it): http://www.dustygroove.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap...la&issearch=yes I wish DEEP was around to provide some background on this one. All young upstate New Yorkers, it seems, a bunch of college boys who take the Blakey/Silver Messengers as their starting/finishing point, and (seemingly) get hyped up on speed and/or steroids to do so. Everything is played ARGH!, but it works. Works well in fact. These guys are totally without the nuance and subtext of the best hard bop, but they compensate for it by playing/riding a runaway rollercoaster of SWING. Think of it as an action movie, and its hard to resist. Sound quality is not that great, sounds like it was recorded in and extremely "local" studio, but what the hey? Hey - I got my guilty pleasures in jazz too, and vintage hard bop that does nothing but take the genre at face value is one of them, at least when everybody buys into the premise as thoroughly as these guys do. One ballad, one or two medium tempi, and the rest is fast and faster. And nobody falters even slightly. I'm surprised to say this, but... EXCELLENT!

Glad you're enjoying it, Sal. I agree that it gets more interesting with each listen, especially the interaction between Sonny and the drummer.

There were also two Down Beat awards shows, the first one pretty memorable - Rahsaan, Sonny, McCoy... I've got a reel-to-reel of an extremely amateur off-the-tube audio recording of a lot of that one. Wonder if it still plays...

I don't mind listening to dead guys play there own music, and I especially enjoy hearing living people play their own music . It's the live ones trying to play like the dead ones that bugs the piss out of me.

Two other things from the same tour to keep an eye out for are the Dragon CD TRION IN STOCKHOLM 1959, and the Moon SONNYMOON FOR TWO, which is a little "below" the other two, but which also has one selection from the 1969 IN DENMARK two volume boot, which is one of the glories of Rollinshood.

A little less immediate in impact, but still strong in mood. There's some good tunes on that one too. Honestly, how it grabs me is highly variable, sometimes strongly sometimes less so. I get into it the most when I listen from a "player's perspective", which doesn't mean that I'm listening to critique technical things, but just that I'm listening as if I was doing the playing, which means feeling the rhythms of the phrases, the way the pauses fit with what the rhytm section is doing at the time, and anticipating the note choices as they go along. Feeling as much of the physical aspect of the actual music-making as I'm able to. When I listen like this, the amount of CHOICES that Sonny is making in even his lesser latter-day solos really stands out - the tonal inflections in relation to the time are one thing that never ceases to grab me, as do the variety of attacks that he's using. This guy is still totally involved in his playing, even if the level of inspiration varies widely. Listening from that perspective might be asking too much of the "average fan", probably is, in fact. But I tell you, when I listen to an album like DANCING IN THE DARK like this, it's a whole helluva lot more involving than when I listen to it from a strictly subjective "listening" standpoint. When I do that, the solos seem too short and sometimes only half-formed. The other way, I can hear (and feel) the music being made, and I know enough about playing the tenor to know that solos like those on the two takes of "Allison" sound a LOT less involved (in both ways) than they really are. They might be considerably less than the apex of Rollins' creativity, but the amount of involvement and committment in the playing is not insignificant, nor is it in any way "predictable" (and if predictability and creativity seem to be thge same thing, well, sometimes yes, sometimes no...). DANCING IN THE DARK is one of those "borderline" albums, one that I would hesitate to reccommend wholeheartedly, but one that I'd not dismiss either (which pretty much sumes up a LOT of the Milestone albums). The GOOD stuff is even more engaging!

10 essential Rollins albums? All the usual suspects, of course, but I'd like to mention a few 70s and beyond things that I've found continuously rewarding over the years, although none are "perfect" in the way(s) that the classics of the 50s and 60s were. NEXT ALBUM - the big "comeback" album. Other than the sluggish opening track and the residual signs of not having played regularly for a while, a really great album. "The Everywhere Calyso" and "Skylark" are classics AFAIC. IN JAPAN - this one displays the "new" Rollins approach as well as anything. Larry might find it disheartening in its lack of emotional "complexity", but I find it exhillirating. It's the "this is what I do" approach in full glory, and "this is what I do" is to just play the tenor. Again, though, the opening cut is the weakest, a trait of Rollins albums from the 70s on that infuriates me to no end. But the comparing version of "Alfie's Theme" here with the Impulse versions is instructive - the latter were complex in the extreme, emotionally and technically, whereas this newer version is not really that complex emotionally, but is still incredibly involed technically and creatively. NUCLEUS - this one took a LOT of time to grab me, but once it did, it hasn't let go. There's a lot of unabashed R&B grooves on this one, and Sonny doesn't really try to do much more than ride them, which is not what I neither wanted or expected. But when I came to accept it for what it was, it's become a nice "people" album for me, Sonny's equivalent of a good Eddie Harris album (GASP!), which might seem beneath the man, but is also to me reflective of the desire that even the giants have to at least be sometimes "just plain folk". WHAT he plays on most of this one might not grab you, but HOW he plays it is what finally grabbed me. Besides, there's two straight-ahead cuts on this one that are pretty mind-boggling.... G-MAN - Live, loud, and proud. Get the LP if you can find it, because the CD has a "bonus" cut of "Tenor Madness" that is basically Rollins-free. It's "this is what I do" again - just a lot of tenor playing, and damn great tenor playing it is. FALLING IN LOVE WITH JAZZ - This one has REALLY gotten under my skin. Again, the opening cut is the weakest, and there may or may not be "too much" space allocated to other people's playing, but Sonny's playing on this one is magnificent -full of vigor and some of the "quirkiness" of the ALFIE date (but matter-of-factly so). The version of "Little Girl Blue" on here is another deep classic, imo, and the version of "I Should Care" where Sonny "merely" plays the melody and ends it it a slowly downward bending note, a pulling back of the curtain, it seems, to reveal Branford Marsalis' take on Sonny's own mid-1950s style" is a supremely ironic/knowing moment. +3 - this one has had its adherents from the beginning, and seems to be "gathering steam" critrically. Allow me to concur. The only ones to REALLY avoid are THE WAY I FEEL and REEL LIFE. All of the others have moments, some of them quite strong moments, in fact (DANCING IN THE DARK has enough of them to probably make my list here, in fact), but don't really sustain interest as albums per se. To that end, get the SILVER CITY box. and leave well enough alone. No, they're not the Rollins of old, any of these. They are what they are. Proceed accordingly.

The Aix-en-Province disc is being asked about here: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=12418

Dmitry, read Larry Kart's comment on this disc here: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...view=getnewpost

And how indicative of why today's "jazz" interests me less and less...

Go back and get that mofo NOW. It's a loose, what sounds like a club, date. No pressure. Sonny just relaxes and stretches out. And out... Sound is just fine. More than just fine, actually. Playing times a wee bit short, but as Tracy said of Hepburn, what there is is chice. From the geek POV, I think that this is also the last recording of Rollins before the sabbatical. It's easy, possible, and perhaps even accurate to "read" all sorts of things into his playing here in that regard, namely a sense of "completion" with the hard bop conventionalities that he had a large part in creating, as well as hearing some new concepts that he just wasn't able to fully technically execute yet. Puts the sabbatical into a practical and sane light, it does. One of my favorite Newk boots.

I'll strongly recommend getting the Roy thing just for that one cut. It's that good. Swings like a mofo, and Joe is at his loosest and groovingest. Joe played "Invitation" a lot over the years, but other than one ridiculous private recording I've heard, this is THE one, in my opinion. Over the years, There have been occasional albums that I've bought (and kept) for just one cut, and VISTALITE has been one of them.

BACK!

That Haynes album (or the VISTALITE portion of it anyway, which is all I know) pretty much sucks except for the version of "Invitation", which is one of Joe Henderson's greatest moments on record, bar none.